


cigarettes & whiskey

by v3ilfire



Category: Fallout 3
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-05-02 12:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5247731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v3ilfire/pseuds/v3ilfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guilt. What he felt was guilt. </p><p>He should have gone northwest to find her instead of slumping in front of the radio and waiting for her to stroll through the doors in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He didn’t know why he felt obligated to - he’d lost employers before, but he never felt even a pinprick of the sickly tightness in his stomach that he did at the thought of losing this one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cigarettes & whiskey

101 had a habit of being in a foul mood about three quarters of the time, but that usually involved a lot more swearing and sarcasm and occasionally a warning shot at someone she found annoying. Never before had Charon seen her sitting _so_ still, not at Carol’s, with her hands tangled through her choppy hair and barely holding her head up. Her whiskey was still full and honestly Charon didn’t even know if she was still awake. In fact, he was pretty sure she hadn’t slept since -- well.   

Carol eyed him and nodded towards Gemma, becoming even more insistent when met with Charon’s confusion. As if aware that they were playing side-eye tennis about her, Gemma let her hands drop and slunk off her stool.   
“Greta, can I bum a smoke?”  

\--- 

Charon found her in the lobby, spinning lamely in one of the chairs at the center desk. She had whipped a cloud of smoke about herself, at a glance already a third of the way through the pack of stale cigarettes Greta had given her out of sheer pity.  

The lobby was eerily silent without the noise of her Pip-Boy radio, or consequently, her mindless humming. She had turned it off the moment they hit Rivet City, not wanting to hear Three-Dog’s sort-of hopeful proclamations about the state of the Jefferson memorial. 

_No sign of the kid's father, though. Here's hoping James is okay._

Gemma’s thousand-mile stare went right past him, eyes still glued to that rotunda, probably. He wouldn’t put it past her if she didn’t even see him loitering awkwardly by the door, though surprising a girl handy with a shotgun was not high on his list of things he wanted to do that day.   
“Hey,” he managed. She nodded in his direction, still spinning, cigarette nearly falling out of her mouth. “Greta said the ferals in the lower levels are makin’ a ruckus again.”  

\--- 

_James was the last to fall to the ground. Charon’s eyes went right to Gemma, waiting for the kid to go berserk, but she was completely stoic. The radiation in the rotunda was making his skin tingle - everyone inside was deader than dead. No smoothskin could survive that. Not even 101.  
_ _“Alright, Li. Open the door.”_

_Li blinked. The two of them never really got along - Charon was hired after they first met, but he wasn’t nearly stupid enough to overlook the venom in their tone and the diligence with which Gemma avoided interacting with her.  
_ _“What?”  
_ _“Gone deaf, Li?” Gemma said, turning slightly towards the doctor. “The door.”  
_ _“Gemma, we have to leave. James only bought us a couple of minutes.” Gemma raised a brow, and that was when Charon remembered that the kid came from a Vault, where radiation was a means to scare disobedient children from the great, mean Wasteland._    
 _"Yeah, I know. So the faster you open the door, the faster we get the fuck out of here. I don’t see the gap in logic, here.”  
_ _“That chamber is filled with deadly amounts of radiation. We have to leave, before the rest of them get here.”_

 _He watched the words ‘deadly’ ‘radiation’ and ‘James’ swirl around in her head and coagulate._  

 _\---_  

A month, and she barely said fifty words. Not even the dog was cheering her up, and usually that mongrel could turn her day around by taking a shit. She didn’t mention it, but she was obviously avoiding Rivet City like the plague, and every time they passed the blue energy fields surrounding the Jefferson Memorial, her shoulders sank. 

She sat at the edge of a plateau, watching Megaton glimmer on the horizon, the dog curled around her waist. Another day’s travel, and she’d be at her house. She had told Charon he could stay in one of the spare rooms, though he was reluctant to take her up on the offer. Idly, Gemma reached over to pat the mutt on the head.   
“Hi, Dogmeat,” she muttered as if it’d just gotten there.  

Charon didn’t really know why he _cared_ \- she was his contracted employer. Paid a whole thousand caps for him (Ahzrukhal had wanted _two_ thousand or Greta dead, but the kid worked her magic and managed, as she always did). But she wasn’t Ahzrukhal - not by a mile. She didn’t lord his contract over him, didn’t make him kill innocent people over petty grudges, or justify anything as ‘just business.’ She was a kid who needed help finding her dad. She offered to pay him, took care of his equipment, made sure he was fed and had clean water to drink when she could; and while he denied the caps (they weren’t part of his contract), the other things she told him to treat like a bonus for good work. And she let him say _no_ to her - the first time was a thrill. He had expected backlash, expected to be threatened or have her shotgun in his face, but … she just shrugged, and did it herself. 

She treated him like a person. He never even had time to wonder how that felt until she showed up.

Gemma didn’t budge when he came to sit by her, though still an arm’s length away. They sat in near-perfect stillness until Charon pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, opened it, and extended it to her. She turned her head to stare at the cigarettes, but when her eyes flicked to him Charon suddenly felt uneasy - but not the same way he felt when a Mutie sent a hundred rounds a second flying towards his head. That was a familiar rush of adrenaline, at least. Unlike … this.

“Thanks,” she whispered, and took a cigarette, drawing a lighter from her pocket. Her eyes seemed a little less distant in the sparks.  
“So uh… what now, boss?” Gemma shrugged, and reached down towards the base of the rock. From behind her perch, she drew a bottle of whiskey and, one swig later, she extended the bottle towards Charon. He merely stared.  
“Problem?”   
“You sure you wanna do that?”  
“Do what?”  
“Share with a zombie?” 

The face she made was answer enough. He took the drink. 

Now, the kid was by no means a lightweight, but when she nearly fell over trying to pass the rapidly emptying bottle back to him, he knew something had to give. Without thinking, he scoot a little closer on the rocky ledge, and once she took hold of the whiskey, took out his pack again. Gemma drained the rest of the brown swill and chucked its container haplessly down the cliffside. She waited for the sound of glass against rock, only moving once she felt her arm tapped with the cigarettes.  

Charon had the tolerance of a Brahmin that had been an alcoholic in a past life, but even he was feeling a little fuzzy in the head. Which - that would most likely explain why he didn’t immediately flinch away when Gemma slumped into him, her head drooping, the only sign of consciousness being the fact that she was still smoking. 

“The Enclave’ll pay,” she said with more clarity than he’d expected. “Fuck the Brotherhood. Fuck Project Purity. But I’ll make the Enclave _pay_.” 

The dog whimpered at her side and she gave it a clumsy pat on the neck, somehow without moving the rest of her body. Still slumped over. Still _leaning_ on _him_. Charon didn’t necessarily _hate_ it - she was squishy and warm and soft, probably - he’d know for sure if he’d half a mind to budge his hand the last inch towards hers.

He flinched only when she rolled upwards again, though her arm stayed in contact with his. “You don’t have to come,” she finished. 

“You’ve got my contract,” he pointed out. Gemma turned to look at him- her face so _close_ and he couldn’t tell _why_ that unnerved him _still_ \- and then reached into her jacket to pull out the scrap of paper that passed for his contract.   
“Huh,” she said as she examined it, and brought the cigarette to her mouth again with the other hand. If Charon didn’t know better, he’d think she forgot all about it. 

She tucked it back in her jacket mindlessly.   
  
“And here I was hoping we were friends.”   
“You’re a weird fuckin’ smoothskin, you know that?”  
“I’ve been called worse,” she said as she turned towards him again. He made the mistake of turning his head as well and there she was - _too_ close again - and then something changed in her eyes and there was that _look_. He was a _person_ , a friend, and something --   
“You’ve got a long day tomorrow,” he blurted out. 

His arm got cold when she went to sleep on the ground behind him. 

\---  

Nobody dared talk to Charon when he near crawled back to Underworld by himself, taking his dutiful place in the corner of the Ninth Circle. He did not go to get his still-visible injuries patched up or even greet anyone as he walked in - only took up a whiskey and turned up the radio. 

 _The Enclave will pay,_ and yet he watched her be carried off on an officer’s shoulder after the flash bang went off in Vault 87. He couldn’t shoot around her _and_ the plasma, not fast enough. They were gone and jammed the door before he could even think to follow. And of course, for all of Three-Dog’s usual yapping, that son of a bitch was playing music when he needed news most. 

There were too many things flying through Charon’s head to fully comprehend all at once - that kid was his employer. His contract in the Enclave’s hands would be a first-grade nightmare for all involved, himself especially. He’d had enough self-serving animosity from Ahzrukhal without wanting it from a over-powered and militant government that would just as easily blow up Underworld as blink. 

They could blow up the wanderer, too. 

Thankfully, the song drowned out, and Three-Dog’s greeting shook him from his unfortunate, accelerating spiral. 

_Yikes. Looks like the Lone Wanderer has wandered herself right into the Enclave's sinister clutches. My deep cover super secret agents tell me a Vertibird recently flew out of the mountains to the west, and the Vault kid was an unwilling passenger. I mean, how willing can you be when you're encased in a block of ice? Crazy, I know, but these are crazy times we live in... Anyway, the Vertibird was headed northwest into the mountains, where I have it on good authority the Enclave has their big underground clubhouse. Good luck, Wanderer. You'll need it._

(“I don’t need luck. I’ve got you,” she said to him once, when he threw a sarcastic ‘good luck’ her way in the wake of what he thought to be yet another suicide mission. Silently, he hoped the two weren’t mutually exclusive.)

\--- 

Guilt. What he felt was _guilt_. 

He should have gone northwest to find her instead of slumping in front of the radio and waiting for her to stroll through the doors in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He didn’t know why he felt obligated to - he’d lost employers before, but he never felt even a pinprick of the sickly tightness in his stomach that he did at the thought of losing this one.  

(He couldn’t even think her name without wanting to vomit.) 

Three-Dog hadn’t stopped hollering all week about how the Memorial was working again, how they tore through the Enclave to get to the damn thing. How the kid nearly sacrificed it all to turn on that _blasted_ filter. He _thought_ about going to Rivet City to find her. But he couldn’t. He didn’t know why, only that he couldn’t.

At least Charon didn’t put it past her to come to the Ninth Circle as she always did: right through the doors in her rightful cloud of smoke, cigarette hanging limp from the side of her mouth. She sat herself down next to him at the bar, and reached for his glass.   
“Mind sharing with a smoothskin?” but the glass was already at her lips. He didn’t mind anyway.  
“Heard you messed up the Enclave pretty bad.”  
“Yeah, but apparently I didn’t mess them up _enough_. Up for a trip?”  

She didn’t pull out his contract. He wondered if it was still folded into her breast pocket.

\--- 

Gemma stood waiting to charge behind Liberty Prime like it was every day that she ran around with a giant, military-grade robot. Charon, meanwhile, couldn’t take his eyes off the damn thing. It was _huge_ , and it talked. About Commies and pre-war bullshit, sure, but seeing something that size talk was a lot more impressive than being hassled by Cerberus. 

He made the mistake of turning to look at her again. Damn smoothskin with her cigarette and her shotgun, short hair blowing in the breeze. She looked alive for the first time since before all the Project Purity bullshit, and he hadn’t even noticed the difference until after she was back again.   
“Do I have something on my face?” she prodded as she met his stare. 

 _Too close_ , but that’s when Liberty Prime stole her attention with its first step.  

The fray turned to chaos the moment it began. Enclave and Brotherhood fell left and right, but somehow he and the kid managed to break through and follow the damn robot to the barrier. Gemma looked _thrilled_ that they’d _done_ it, this would be over, the Enclave would be eradicated - and then they heard the engine of a plane.   
“Charon, go.”  
“No way in hell,” he spat back. “You’ve got my contract.” _I’m not leaving you._    
“The fucking robot is counting down, now get gone, god damn it!”   
“I said no, smoothskin.”   
“You’re _fired_ for fuck’s sake, there’s the plane, now _go!”_   

She shoved him and he had a solid five-second head start on her when the plane started circling, Liberty Prime firing and missing every damn shot by the sound of it. Charon was moving without processing, doing as he was _ordered_ because she had his _contract_. 

But he’d said no to her before. 

He turned around just as she was caught in the blast radius. A Paladin dragged him back to the door of the bunker, only to be kicked out of the Brotherhood’s way swiftly and without question. Angry, confused, and heavy-hearted, he started his trek back to DC. 

\--- 

This time, he did not listen to the radio. The moment he sat down in his usual spot, his corner table, he shot the radio to smithereens. No one dared talk about the broadcasts near him after that. In fact, after a while, people just stopped coming.

Without the radio and the patrons, the Ninth Circle was _quiet_. He found that he missed the incessant humming more than the music.

Charon spent the whole week doing little other than sitting and drinking and thinking. Gemma had his contract, if she wasn’t a pile of ashes in the Wasteland, and he was pretty sure that she _was_. He had nothing left but time and … time. _Freedom_ , he realized after some thought, though it didn’t feel new enough for the word to have any weight. 

Gemma was the one that helped free him. _That_ had weight. 

The door creaked open behind him, and shut. Charon couldn’t give less of a shit until the seat across from him became occupied by a smoothskin shrouded in smoke.   
“So,” she said, nonchalant as ever, ignoring that he was staring at her with wide-eyed shock, “funny story but I uh - I was cleaning out my jacket the other day, and I found something weird in the lining.”  

Gemma reached into her breast pocket and Charon’s heart stilled. She laid a burnt and wrinkled scrap of paper between them, the edges browned from blood and fire alike. It had writing on it before, probably, but none of it was legible any longer. “How’s unemployment feel?”   
“How the fuck did you survive?”   
“What?”  
“That robot blew up.”   
“Have you … not been listening to the radio?” Gemma followed Charon’s eyes to what was left of the device at the bar. “Oh. Well uh - explosion ended up being… well I burnt the _shit_ out of my arm. But I’m -- I mean, I’m _here_.”  

When she realized he had no answer for that - not even a curse, Gemma sighed. “Well, I mostly came to show you this,” she said as she slid what was left of his contract towards him. “But I also have an offer for you.”  
“Like what?” Gemma took a drag of her cigarette and instinctively, he reached for his own pack - empty when he needed it, of course. She looked like she was about to start on her offer when she caught his disgruntled expression, and, with a laugh, stuffed a hand into her jacket and offered hers out to him. Charon stared, until she tapped his arm with it. 

As he took a cigarette, his hand brushed against hers. It was soft. She didn’t flinch. 

Charon lit his cigarette with a renewed dryness in his throat. Gemma took the opportunity to steal a sip of his whiskey - he slid the glass back towards her when she put it down in front of him.   
“So, here’s my offer: you and me, terrorizing the wastelands, but this time you take your fair share of caps.”   
“Don’t you have other people to bother with this?”   
“Sure,” she said, but didn’t budge.  
“Why’d you fire me?” Gemma blinked. “It was my job to keep you in one piece, but you fired me.”  

The question clearly caught 101 off-guard. It was comforting to think he wasn’t the only one. 

“There was a bomb coming and you were in the way.”  
“It was my job to be in the way.”   
“Is it also your job to ask this many questions?” she said, clearly flustered.  
“I’m unemployed. Why did you fire me?”  

She’d stilled again, which made the speed with which she launched herself from her seat and across the table even more shocking. She’d caught him between drags, the tip of his lit cigarette dangerously close to her neck, but she didn’t seem to care. Charon didn’t even fully register that she was kissing him until she was already sitting back down, furiously and brilliantly red, trying to hide her face in the whiskey glass. Apparently even she was shaken by her own impulse. 

She was soft. She was soft and fleshy, with real lips and eyelashes and soft hands, still rounder about the middle than most others (though not quite as much as when he’d first met her - eating scraps and running most of the day did that to a person). It was so hard to process the relief at seeing her alive and the anger at being sent away that he didn’t realize he’d been _afraid_ of losing the dumbass for reasons other than his professional integrity (if it could be called that).  

Stupid girl, soft all over, somehow survived more than an army could and kept crawling back to him like he was worth more than a few clever words and a thousand caps. 

“Weird fuckin smoothskin,” he said as he stood, if mostly to get away from the impulse of _touching_ her. He wasn’t used to soft. He didn’t realize he’d _like_ soft.

Charon made it to the door when he realized that she was still at the table, trying to shroud herself in smoke again. He bit back a comment about Stealth Boys working better - she looked like she needed a second more than _he_ did. “Are you coming, or what?”   
“Wha -- wait, you’re coming with me?”   
“Sure. Just don’t -- don’t do what you just did. In public, anyway,” he added hastily, suddenly glad that nobody could see it if he reddened or not.   
“And in private?” she choked out, leaving both of them embarrassed and scrambling.   
“Fuckin’. _Yes_. Whatever.” 

Well, that _half_ made sense. It was enough to get Gemma up and to the door, at least. She had her hand on the handle when she found herself turned ‘round by the waist and sandwiched between a too-tall ghoul and the aging wood, lip-locked and rendered completely useless.  
He was out the door by the time she opened her eyes again, helpless against a stupid grin that made her cheeks hurt.   
“Are you coming or not?” he hollered from the other side of the door.  
“Oh, fuck yourself,” she yelled back, making a solid attempt at regaining control of her face before following. She noticed that he made the distinct effort _not_ to look at her.  

For both of their sakes, she wouldn’t mention that he brushed his hand against hers three times before they even left Underworld. She _definitely_ wouldn’t mention the look Greta gave her when she noticed.  

 


End file.
